2024-08-14

August 14, 2024

The August school board meeting continued Donald Patton's reign of chaos, but it had the added benefit of ending around midnight this time, so there was that.

This was the first meeting following the July "reorganization" meeting, where Patton and Smith-Tucker were re-elected to board leadership.  Newly emboldened, they continued their quest, which will only end in ruin for the district and likely themselves.

Roll Call

Much like last meeting, I made a point of order during roll call regarding Naveed Baqir.  He has no been out of the United States of America, and thus out of Delaware, for around 220 so far this year (he's been here maybe 5 days in 2024 so far).  My reading of Delaware law is that he is a non-resident and is thus not a board member.

Following the rest of the board's refusal to follow the law regarding Baqir (or get a definitive opinion for the Department of Education, Department of Elections, or Department of Justice), I made my protests known for every 4:3 vote that was counted with Baqir in the majority.

Agenda Item 4: Approval of the agenda

Board policy states that any board member may have any agenda item she wishes to be placed on the agenda.  However, board policy does not state that once the meeting starts, that those items must remain on the agenda.  Similar to previous meetings, Patton's number-one crony Smith-Tucker made the motion to approve the agenda with all of non-Patton-faction items removed.

With petty leadership like this, it is basically impossible to discuss, in public, any item that Patton does not want discussed.  He and his cronies "vote the way they're gonna vote", and it just so happens to be however he wants them to.

Needless to say, the board did not discuss its arbitrary and capricious actions at the July meeting; it did not act on any of the recent reporting about the illegal dealings of Baqir; it did not act on any of the potential fraud allegations of Baqir; it did not do anything to help right its wrongs.  I guess we'll just have to wait for the various state and federal agencies to get their shit together and take action on their own.

Agenda item 5: Approval of minutes

The original minutes did not reflect my point of order with regard to Baqir, nor my protests at a number of votes in which his vote was the deciding vote.  They also did not reflect the fact that neither myself, nor Moriak, nor Trauth were present for adjournment.  All such items were corrected.

Agenda item 6: Public comment

Christina's very own favorite Internet frenemy, Kevin Ohlandt (author of Exceptional Delaware), registered for public comment well in advance of the meeting.  However, Patton ended public comment without calling his name.  When I pressed him on this during a point of order, Patton stated that there were no other people registered for public comment.  Typical Patton move: lying to my face when he knows that I know.

Patton later tried to excuse his behavior by saying "it has been determined that the person lives in New York" and then straight-up fabricating "the Justice Department and our lawyer have determined that that person doesn't have a right because they live in New York".  The district lawyer got back to us today (after receiving a complaint from a state representative) and stated, clearly, "I have not opined that we can forbid non-citizen comment at a public meeting", clarifying that non-Delaware-citizens do not have a right to receive public records via FOIA.  It would appear that Patton "conveniently" confused the two items after being caught in the first lie, and then crafting the second.

Kevin requested that I read his public comment statement out loud, since he was (illegally) forbidden to speak.  I read it out loud during my report at the end of the meeting.  More on this later.

Agenda Item 8.02: Board president's report

Around 5:20pm, I received a tip to look at the public agenda, and holy shit: Patton literally published a confidential document from a former employee's personnel file.  This employee was featured heavily in my report on Patton that I presented to the board back on April 16, but it was a document that I had never seen before.  Patton claimed that it had been previously reported on the Internet, but as someone who has been following this issue closely, I can assure you: this document had never been shared before.

(For what it's worth, I was able to validate the document, and it fully corroborated the relevant parts of my report.)

The district's lawyer was immediately contacted by the former employee, and Moriak had the obvious common sense to do the right thing and instruct staff to take the document down.  Upon finding out, Patton argued and demanded that it remain up and that no one had the right to take it down but him.  After protesting loudly to make a show, he quietly took no further action and did not re-publish the document.

Agenda Item 10.12: Hand to Mind

We pulled this from the consent agenda because of the many teachers that contacted us expressing their concerns.  Basically, the district was asking to spend over $175,000 (that's like 3 teacher's salaries) on "manipulatives" as part of the new math curriculum.  For those of you who don't spend all day in school, manipulatives are the little things that help students take an abstract concept and make it concrete.  For example, think of those little blocks that you may have used to help learn how to count to 10 (and then to 100).

Obviously, those things are important, but they're generally content-agnostic.  Little blocks for counting work if they're green or blue, if they're 1cm wide or 2cm wide, if they're rough or smooth, if they're old or new.  Because of this, classrooms can use the same manipulatives for many different lessons over many different years; they work with any curriculum (sometimes the book might reference the "counting frogs", but last decade's "counting foxes" work exactly the same).

The larger problem is that we know that our classrooms have lots of manipulatives; we might even have too many.  We don't know.  Instead of approving the purchase as-is, we instructed the district to have its schools create an inventory of their manipulatives, determine their individual needs for them, and routing that through the district for centralized purchasing.  We capped the amount at $50,000 max, only to be spent as needed.  In the event that so many classrooms are missing so many manipulatives, the district can come back with the inventory, the documented need, and the board can authorize additional spending as required.

Agenda Item 11.01: Certificate of necessity

Motion: Yes

Last meeting, we instructed the district to put together a certificate of necessity for the state that would include the work done on the middle schools as well as the priority work for the high schools.  The district presented its work, and we clarified that we wanted both the middle school work in its entirety, as well as the additional $10M for the high-priority high-school items.

Agenda Item 11.07: SRO contracts

Motion: No

I think that we've talked about this before on here, but there are two kind of security personnel practically available for schools:

Police officers are just that: police officers, who work for the state, the city, etc., who are contracted to work within the district.  They do not report to the district administration.  They are not disciplined by the district administration.  And their contract requires that they are armed at all times.

Constables, on the other hand, are state-trained school security personnel.  They are typically former police officers, but not always.  They are true district employees, and they ultimately report to the superintendent (and this to the board).

There are some problems with state law that make it inconvenient to replace police offers with constables in the schools.  Primarily, the de-escalation tactic of handcuffing a student cannot be performed by constables.  If the school security team needs to break up a large fight and needs to separate and restrain combative students, the cannot do it.  To accomplish that task, they need to call the police, who will bring their guns into the school and likely arrest a student that they handcuff.  The SROs do not have such a limitation, and thus they do not typically make arrests.

I am currently working with legislators to update our laws so that our constables can do their jobs effectively and accountably.  Hopefully we'll see results in the next legislative session, which starts in January.

Moriak is in favor of a transition: we continue with what we have, but we plan to phase out the police and replace them with constables as applicable until all of our school security personnel are truly our personnel.  She's right, and it might be chaotic if we suddenly cancelled our SRO contracts without any alternative options in place.  But I am a firm believer in getting guns out of the schools, and I do not want unaccountable cops in the schools when we can have our own employees there instead.

Agenda Item 11.08: Legal services

Motion: Yes

Since our lawyer basically quit because this board is out of control and indefensible, we need to find new legal representation.  We're going to go out to bid for legal services for the first time in decades.  Hopefully we'll find a law firm that wants to deal with us.

Agenda Item: 11.17: Recommendations for interim superintendent

Motion: No

I'll level with you guys: I have absolutely no fucking idea what happened here.  Without any discussion, Lou "suggested" former interim superintendent Robert Andrzejewski to be the current interim superintendent and the motion passed or something.  What passed?  No clue.  But don't we already have a superintendent?  Of course we do.  Aren't we still paying our superintendent?  Naturally.  Does this make Andrzejewski the interim superintendent?  I don't know.  When would that start?  No clue.

According to the Newark Post's reporting, Lou claimed that candidates had been discussed in executive session.  This wasn't discussed back in July, and it certainly wasn't discussed yesterday.  In executive session, we very specifically stopped any discussion on this matter as inappropriate and agreed to have the discussion in public.

What I think happened is that Lou inadvertently admitted to an illegal executive session that happened after last night's executive session concluded.  We had actually wrapped up around 20 minutes early, so Amy, Monica, and I went to the stage.  It would appear that Patton and Smith-Tucker stayed in the room while Baqir and Lou were on the Zoom call still and had a second meeting.

Agenda Item 13.02: Board member reports

It's been a while since I haven't been so disgusted by the board's behavior that I have actually stuck around for board member reports.  Usually it's well past midnight by the time that we get here, and I wouldn't have anything nice to say anyway.

As I mentioned earlier, I used my time to read Ohlandt's public comment; he published it here if you'd like to read it.

Patton threw a fit when I started to read the public comment out loud and tried to silence me, but that kind of stuff doesn't work.  He did somehow convince Bob Goff to kill my microphone, so I just cupped my hands and projected my voice instead.  Smith-Tucker tried to talk over me, but I don't think that she was louder than I was.  The official audio/video cuts off like 10 seconds in to my report, so you can't hear the rest of it.  Conveniently, I have a recording; you may listen to it if you'd like.  It's worth listening past the end of my report to hear the bickering and banter afterward.  You'll note that the meeting was never adjourned 🤷‍♀️ 

I didn't hear any of the crosstalk because I was being very loud so that everyone could hear me, but according to WDEL, Patton tried (and failed) to have the constables remove me, and he also demanded a list of names of  staff members insufficiently loyal to him in the audience so that he could discipline them.  Dude's such a schmuck.